[Evan] found his minion at a McDonald’s and took out essentially everything inside of it, using the minion as a case for all of the interesting bits. First he scavenged a PS/2 port from an old motherboard. An Arduino Nano is wired to an HC-05 Bluetooth chip to translate the signals from the PS/2 peripherals into Bluetooth. The HC-05 chip is a cheaper alternative to most other Bluetooth chips at around $3 vs. $40 for more traditional ones. The programming here is worth mentioning: [Evan] wrote a non-interrupt based and non-blocking PS/2 library for the Arduino that he open sourced which is the real jewel of this project.

Once all the wiring and programming is done [Evan] can turn essentially any old keyboard and mouse into something that’ll work on any modern device. He also put an NFC tag into the minion’s head so that all he has to do to connect the keyboard and mouse is to swipe his tablet or phone past the minion.

Primary image

What does it do?

Runs around avoiding obstacles... and falling sometimes :)

Hello!

I guess you guys already know that I have a little baby. Even though he's small, he's already very watchful seeing the robots running around the house (we had much fun together with the mBot and his lights). So I made this buddy thinking it would be fun for him as well.

Currently I have not worked much with scraps, but I have a lot of them at my lab.